Customer OverviewA division of the world’s largest aerospace company, Boeing Defense, Space, and Security (BDS) provides end-to-end services for large-scale systems that enhance defense and security platforms for global military, government, and commercial customers. ChallengeThe BDS IT team needs to provide clients with high-performance technical computing and SAN environments. Some of the proprietary program environments it provides require 24x7 operations and the highest availability possible. When the global recession hit the aerospace industry in 2010, BDS came under extreme pressure to cut costs, driving the company to look for a high-performance solution with increased hardware utilization that could be managed with minimal staff.BDS also needed to reduce the TCO of its SANs, storage management, and networking for local and remote sites. Additionally, it needed to increase network agility, improve scalability, and support IT goals of providing customer and company communities services and resources faster and easier. SolutionSince deploying its first Cisco Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) implementation in 2010, BDS has extended its use of FCoE and is now 100 percent multihop FCoE. BDS leverages the high-performance, high-density Cisco Nexus 7000 F-series Ethernet switches as its core switches and Cisco Nexus 5000 switches as access switches. BDS architecture can be described as a shared grid, with the Cisco Nexus 7010 as the central plexus. Cisco Nexus 5010 switches route both the storage and servers to the top of the racks and then to the central switches. All CNAs and internal networks are 10GB per channel and above. The infrastructure also supports 1GB NAS boxes for non-intensive applications, and legacy products including NAS, NFS, and IPv4.BenefitsImproved performance 20 percent by transitioning to converged network Reduced deployment times for each new server by 25%Boosted IP performance by up to 30 percent, saved 35% in capital expenses, and cut 90% of power costsReduced number of cables, switches, and servers